Richard Adams

Richard Adams was an English novelist whose writing career began unusually late. Before becoming a full-time author, he worked in the British civil service. Watership Down, published in 1972, grew from stories he had told his daughters during car journeys and became his defining work.

Adams wrote adventure and fantasy with animals at the center, but without softening the natural world. In Watership Down, Hazel, Fiver and their companions cross the Berkshire and Hampshire countryside after Fiver foresees the destruction of their warren. The rabbits have their own language, legends and social order, while snares, predators and human development remain physical threats. Questions of leadership, freedom, belonging and survival drive the story.

Watership Down received both the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian children’s fiction prize. Martin Rosen directed its influential 1978 animated adaptation. Adams later returned to its world in Tales from Watership Down. His other novels include Shardik, centered on a giant bear and the faith built around it, and The Plague Dogs, about two dogs escaping an animal-research facility.

Start with Watership Down. It introduces Adams at his most vivid: attentive to landscape, unsentimental about danger, and deeply interested in how a vulnerable community forms under pressure. It is also the essential route into the later stories about Hazel’s warren.